It Is Almost That: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Eleanor King, Nadia Myre, Erdem Taşdelen

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Erdem Taşdelen, "The Elements of Discontent: Mental Imagery in the Child," 2015

Reception Friday, May 5, 8PM  

Curated by Ines Min 

Critical works by international artists Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Nadia Myre, Erdem Taşdelen and Eleanor King will be shown for the first time in Vancouver in It Is Almost That, opening May 6. Curated by Ines Min, the exhibition brings together artists from the east and west coasts of North America to investigate the political potential of translation.

The show will feature four bodies of work by the four artists. Cha’s Re Dis Appearing (1977) is a short video that juxtaposes poetic images of a bowl of tea, a beach and water with stream-of-consciousness translations of English and French phrases. King’s Wormholes (2016) are vibrant drawings created by tracing the outline of a CD repeatedly in a spectrum of coloured pencils. Myre’s Orison(2014) are a series of large-scale black-and-white digital prints that expose the reverse side of an older work titled Indian Act(2002). Taşdelen’s The Elements of Discontent(2015) are striking compositions of graphic images sourced from psychology textbooks.

Each artist demonstrates a subversive use of translation, incorporating an act of performance in the production of the work. The exhibition seeks to visualize these hidden processes, engaging in translation as a practice that shifts, destabilizes and negotiates agency. A moment of radical possibility is discovered in the works, which is re-deployed anew with every audience encounter.

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha was born in Busan, South Korea. Her work has been shown at the Berkeley Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Institute of Contemporary Art. Eleanor King is a Nova Scotian artist based in New York City. She has held solo exhibitions at A.I.R. Gallery (New York), the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and Diaz Contemporary (Toronto). Nadia Myre is a visual artist from Quebec and an Algonquin member of the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg First Nation. She recently exhibited in solo shows at OBORO and the National Museum of American Indian (New York), and participated in the 2014 Shanghai Biennale. Erdem Taşdelen lives and works in Toronto. He held a solo show at the Contemporary Art Gallery this year, and has exhibited in group shows at the MAK(Vienna), the Sabanci Museum (Istanbul) and the Museum für Neue Kunst (Freiburg). 

Ines Min is an American writer and editor, and currently a master’s candidate in UBC’s Critical and Curatorial Studies program. She received a Bachelor of Journalism from the University of Texas at Austin, and was the international public relations manager for the 2014 Gwangju Biennale. She has written for artnet News, Art + Auction, Modern Painters, Canvasand Ocula magazine. “It Is Almost That” is her curatorial debut.

The exhibition was organized with support from the Killy Foundation and the Audain Endowment for Curatorial Studies through the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory in collaboration with the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at The University of British Columbia.